A cutting-edge web experience for a futuristic festival.

Smashing Boxes helps bring the future of art, music, and technology to life on the web.

The Challenge

For Moogfest, the experience is everything. Each year Moogfest brings together creative and technology enthusiasts from around the globe for a mind-expanding weekend of conversation and experimentation. The ambitious music festival meets tech conference needed a cutting edge digital presence that embodied their future thinking mission. They also needed an app that made it easy for festival goers to schedule, attend and make the most of Moogfest’s 684 unique events over four days and three nights

Smashing Boxes created a website for Moogfest that elegantly combined tech with Mathew Lucas' design. As a part of the site, they also created Substrate, a stealthy interactive audio visualization, that gave our audience a taste of Moogfest long before the festival began.

Kamran V.

The Approach

Partnership all the way. With Moogfest moving to our own backyard, the festival’s success was doubly important to us. Establishing a shared vision for the festival goer’s experience was our first step. Developing a technical solution to bring that vision to life was our next step. Our objective moving forward would be to create a platform that integrated all of the digital services festival goers would be interacting with seamlessly.

2x

Nominated for two Webby awards

255k

Over 255K visits to the site

18m

18M media impressions

How We Did It

Data Architecture

Moogfest came to us with a suite of disparate platforms for ticketing, scheduling and email. We built a Node API to seamlessly connect and manage data across Eventbrite, Mailchimp, Sched, YouTube and SoundCloud. Integrating Keystone CMS made it easy for the Moogfest team to make content updates. Our data architecture approach made the integrated platforms a powerful tool for over 40,000 festival goers.

Responsive Web Design

Moogfest provided a bold design direction that required a highly-technical execution. The site’s undulating background animations were achieved using 3D mesh and developed with WebGL. By architecting the site’s responsive design, we ensured that the brand experience felt the same on Web, iOS, Android and Linux

Reflecting its role as an incubator for experimentation across technology, art, and music, Moogfest enlisted The Haxan Cloak and Smashing Boxes, a Durham-based digital design firm, to collaborate on turning the Moogfest website into instrument.

Sound on Sound

Audio Visualization

As a bonus Easter Egg for the festival’s future-forward audience, we created Substrate. The interactive application allows users to control eight audio layers and accompanying WebGL visual rendering by swiping, tapping or clicking. Substrate is a constant layer running continuously on every single page, ready for play. Using Electron, we released Substrate with real-time audio input as a cross-platform desktop app for performers.